


blade

by amestriz



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Gen, Light Angst, Spoilers, listen i just really have a lot of feelings about this :/
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-26 05:35:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13851171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amestriz/pseuds/amestriz
Summary: Krolia is his mother. It's kind of a lot to process.spoilers.





	blade

**Author's Note:**

> cross posted from tumblr. have this trash.

Krolia knows the moment she lays eyes on him. 

There is something familiar about him, about the way he carries himself, something she knows so innately she would recognize it anywhere, across galaxies, in death. It is his father, but it is also her, and something inside of her breaks open a little bit, basks in the feeling of finally,  _ finally _ knowing her son, finally seeing his face, his eyes. He looks just like her, and, were their situation less perilous, she would have smiled.

He is undoubtedly human, yes, but he is also undoubtedly her son, from the shape of his eyes to the slope of his nose. He has her lips, pouted just so, but she recognizes the dip of his cupid’s bow as his father’s, the color of his eyes, the set of his brow. He is more beautiful than she could ever be, could have ever hoped, and part of her wants to cry, wants to take him into her arms the way she’s longed to for so long. After 18 long years, separated by planets and galaxies and an entire war, she has finally found him again.

Keith is gaping at her, but she doesn’t blame him. It has been so long, after all, and she’s sure he thought she left him for good, that he hates her for leaving her. His eyes are wide and wet, and from where she stands, she can see his quivering lips, the way he trembles in his own skin, wild and frantic and desperate in a way she can’t quite identify. His fingers are still curled around his blade _ — _ her blade _ — _ and she wishes to unfurl them, to press her hand against his own and soothe the stress that pulls his tendons taut. She remains composed, however, features stoic in the red glow of the ship’s interior, and she waits for him to say something, anything, just a little desperate to hear his voice again.

“Keith,” she murmurs, voice soft and comforting, that of a mother. “Please, say something.”

She’s aware of it before he is, she realizes, but she doesn’t want to overstep her bounds. He is grappling with this new revelation, breaking apart at the seams, overflowing with the rawest kind of hurt she’s ever been privy to. She wants to wrap her arms around him, to comfort him, but she knows now is not the time. Keith takes a stumbling step back, bumping his spine against the backrest of the pilot’s chair, and the shuddering gasp he lets out is enough to break her heart. She swallows the sorrow that builds in her throat, but she doesn’t reach out to him.

Not now, not yet.

* * *

 

 

Keith doesn’t know what he’s feeling. 

He noticed the similarities, at first, from her demeanor down to her appearance, but he hadn’t let himself hope, hadn’t allowed himself to feel the thing he’s been searching for his entire life. Now, standing in front of her, with  _ her _ blade in his hands, he can see it, and he gives himself over to the bubbling relief that builds in his chest, to the anger that rises angry and biting in the pit of his stomach. He is still focusing on the way she said his name, the tone, the way her lips formed the word, and he can’t find what he needs to say to her, how he needs to say it. He can only stare, eyes wide and wet, mouth agape, jaw set. She is his mother, he realizes.

She is his  _ mother _ , and she  _ left  _ him.

He feels it then, the red-hot anger he’s harbored his entire life, and instead of holding it in, he lets it out with a gut-wrenching sob, throwing Krolia’s blade to the ground and rounding on her with an intensity she’d only seen in herself.

“You left me,” he spits, voice cracking. “You  _ left  _ me.”

He hates the desperation that claws at his throat, the anger and the hurt and everything that might come in between, but Keith has never processed his emotions well, and he thinks that lashing out is what he needs, right now, too overwhelmed to properly verbalize, to articulate. Krolia looks down on him with a kind of pity that makes his insides boil, eyes soft, mouth set in the smallest of frowns. He can see the hurt, too, the regret, but he can’t quite deal with that yet.

“I had to,” she whispers, voice quieter than it had been before. “I had to give you a chance. I wanted you to have a life outside of this war.”

In the back of his mind, he thinks about how well that turned out, and he bites back a snarl.

“That’s not an excuse,” he yells, voice harder, firmer, fists clenching at his sides. “I’m your  _ son.  _ How could you just leave me like that?!”

He is angry, more angry than he’s ever been, but he is also hurt, beyond hurt, the strange feeling too much to wrap his head around, coiling itself around his ribs and lodging itself in the spaces there. He feels like he can’t breathe, suddenly, and he is overcome with the realization that his mother is here now, in front of him, flesh and blood, real. The tears come unbidden, and he gives in to them, to their warmth as they spill over his waterline, and he folds in on himself, allowing himself to finally feel, to let go.

“You left me,” he sobs. “You left me.”

* * *

When Krolia hears his sobs, her heart shatters.

She is a soldier, yes, but she is his mother, has  _ always _ been his mother, and she finds herself wrapping her arms around him before she can quite comprehend the gravity of her actions. The armor she wears prevents her from feeling much, but she can still sense his warmth, the overwhelming heat that he seems to exude. He presses his face into her shoulder and wraps his arms about her middle, holding on with all the strength he possesses, and she lets him cry into her embrace, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and pressing her face into his hair, smelling of soot and sweat and blood.

She lets him curl into her, making himself as small as possible, and she does her best to envelope him, to wrap him in her warmth and give him all that she hadn’t been able to in the last 18 years. Something wells up inside of her, then, and she finds herself choking on it, whatever it is. She regrets ever leaving him, more than she will ever regret anything else, and she vows in that moment to never do it again.

“Keith,” she murmurs, voice trembling just so, with the same warmth she had longed to use with him. “Understand that leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I wish with all of my heart that it didn’t come to it. I wish I could’ve watched you grow and learn, and I’m sorry that I had to do what I did. But know that it was for you, for your safety. Know that everything I did, I did for you. You were my baby and I couldn’t let this war touch you. I’m sorry that it did. I’m so sorry that it did.”

And she is, with every fiber of her being. Leaving him on earth was the hardest decision she ever made, but it was also the right one. If he had a chance to grow up normally, outside of the reaches of war, then by the gods would she have given it to him, even if it didn’t last. She wanted him to know what life was like untainted by bloodshed and massacre. She will always regret leaving him, but she will  _ never _ regret giving him the opportunity to live a life away from this, from the barbarity of her heritage, of his own.

He curls into her further, sobs beginning to subside, and she finds herself thinking about how he ended up here, pressed into her arms as they drift through space, prisoners to the war, slaves to a cause. She thinks about the man he’s had to become, about the boy lost to the ravages of a wartorn universe, and she realizes that he will always be a slave to that calling, shedding blood for a movement she couldn’t protect him from. It saddens her, that he was torn apart from her the way he was, that they were to be reunited again through the very war she fought to keep him from, but she finds herself accepting it.

In the moment, right now, he is in her arms, and that is all she could have ever asked for.

Keith settles, finally, and he takes another shuddering breath before he pulls away from her, wiping his eyes and hiding his face. She watches, piece by piece, as he puts up barriers, builds up walls that she’ll have to kick down one by one, as the little boy she lost so long ago turns back into the man she had fought side-by-side with naught but an hour ago. She hates herself, for that, for how erratic his emotions are, for how much he’s truly had to grow. He doesn’t know what to say, and she can see it in the way his brows furrow, the slant of his lips, so she takes a step forward and settles her hands on his shoulders, taking a deep breath.

“Look, I know it’s going to be hard to trust me,” she says, voice firm, “but I need you to. I told you earlier that I’m not going to leave you again, and I meant that. I promise you, Keith. I’m not going to go anywhere.”

“Okay,” he whispers, for lack of anything more suitable. “Okay.”

She knows there is much to discuss, so much left unsaid between the two, but she allows herself to slip back into the soldier, to focus on the mission at hand. Keith seemingly picks up on the change, and he slips back into the pilot’s chair, clearing his throat and focusing on the expanse of space before them, plugging in coordinates for the Marmorite’s base. Krolia promises herself, in that moment, that she will repair the relationship between them, that she will be his mother again.

But that is a matter for tomorrow. Today, they have a war to win.  

**Author's Note:**

> PLS leave feedback i’m begging u.


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